So here’s something you won’t often read on a computer games news site: the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan aren’t going very well, as far as the military is concerned. Yes, I know, politically divisive and all that. But what isn’t really arguable is that the war on terror is putting a weighty strain on the United States military, and recruiting has become a bit of a problem in that almost no one wants to sign up. Last year, the Army continued its trend of missing recruiting benchmarks, both in quantity and quality of new recruits, at a time when a robust military is clearly needed. To make up the gap, the Army has been lowering educational standards for recruits and granting huge numbers of wavers to allow those with criminal histories to join – and for all that, they’re still coming up short. It’s not surprising that the way in which the Army goes about recruiting is about to undergo a serious overhaul.

Here’s something else that is no secret: that game we love playing, America’s Army, is a recruiting tool. Every penny of it’s $6-8 million production cost came out of the taxpayer-supported recruiting budget. So what will happen to our game when it is longer needed for our recruitment?

Thankfully, that shouldn’t be a problem any time soon. In particular, news broke recently that Army recruitment centers may be heading away from the beige, empty offices of the strip mall and towards a hybrid creature that will look something like a Dave and Busters or an Apple store. As reported in Brand Week:

”The first new recruitment center is designed to be less intimidating and more ‘like walking into a NASA center,’ said [Edward Walters, CMO of the U.S. Army]. It will consist of three large simulators with full-scale mock-ups of Army equipment and wrap-around 270-degree video screens.”


The mock-ups will be accompanied by game stations where potential recruits can play on America’s Army game servers while hearing from recruiters about Army life.

So what’s this about? Well, direct recruiting it certainly isn’t. The officers who came by my high school and neighborhood mall those years ago may be on the way out, and it has become clear that simply asking kids what they plan to do after graduation doesn’t convince them to strap on a uniform. Further, in five years of playing AA, I have never felt particularly set upon by recruiters. There’s the Army logo and links to the Army site, sure, but they’re no more intrusive than any game developer’s credentials. When I play Call of Duty 4 I don’t feel hunted by Activision – their name just happens to be on their product.



What this is really about, then, is brand awareness. The Army is betting that if the concept of military enlistment becomes synonymous with words like “adventure”, “fun”, “service”, “bravery” and “heroism”, their recruitment will go up accordingly. The question is, then, whether this new interactive face will be enough to change the fact that insurgents and the 24-hour media cycle are working very hard to make military enlistment synonymous with words like “wounded”, “Iraq”, “casualty” and “post-traumatic stress.” Only time will tell.

Tags: america's army, america's army servers, Army recruitment

This entry was posted on Monday, July 28th, 2008 at 12:27 pm and is filed under America's Army News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.